Bowman’s piece pointed towards the problem for designers in an engineering culture that extends top-down from Marissa Mayer’s techno-Gradgrindery, but we have plenty of examples of other designers whose work is squeezed to accommodate the demands of the ad-selling department. If anything, Google seems less beholden to those kinds of compromises than purer online media properties, but because it’s an internal discussion, there’s lots of space to make presumptions.

But I think it’s a bit of a canard, and also gives Google (in a way) too much credit. I think Android is what it is because Google isn’t great at user-focused design where the users aren’t geeks. Its only truly good design was (and to a certain extent still is) the search engine home page. Everything else is mediocre, not because of who its customers are, but because of who its designers are.

(Worth reading on this, if you haven’t: http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html)

I think John’s just over-complicating it. He’s looking at how bad Android is, and going “Why would a smart company not design something better? It must be because they’re designing for the wrong customer!”. Whereas I just look at everything they’ve done and go “actually, they’re great computer scientists, but they’re really not great designers”.